12:05 pm: News briefs ... Alan
Chan, who has worked on films like Titanic and The Lord
of the Rings, is developing a space movie called Postcards
from the Future. It will "chronicle the life of an ordinary
guy who's job is to build out the power grid for a lunar settlement."
More at Postcards
From The Future - RocketForge - Aug.29.05...

... The Space
Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for
Aerospace Studies has a very active nanosat program:

11:35 am: SciTech: Misleading first impressions
... How many times have you heard a newscaster begin
an item with "Scientists announced today ..."? The report
typically describes the results of a paper just published in a scientific
journal and the conclusions are presented as if they had been established
as fact. However, that isn't usually the case: Most
scientific papers are probably wrong - New Scientist - Aug.30.05.

The problem is seldom due to fraud or even deliberate exaggeration.
It is just the nature of scientific investigation that the first
experiments are incomplete and based on limited amounts of data.
There also can be serious systematic biases and errors, i.e. those
due to the particular type of technology and techniques used in
the experiment.

The same problems hold for theoretical analyses. Even if there
are no errors in the calculations, the analysis must start from
a set of assumptions and estimations and one or more of these may
be incorrect. (I make the brave prediction that over the next century
every year or two there will be a paper published, and reported
on in New Scientist, that proves that travel through a wormhole
is possible followed a year or two later by a paper proving that
such a shortcut is impossible.)

During my time in high energy physics research, there must have
been a dozen announcements of "discoveries" of new particles
or particle properties that turned out to be wrong or at least were
never confirmed by anyone. Fractional charges and a magnetic monopole
were seen at Stanford and anomalons were tracked at Berkeley. A
heavy mass for the neutrino emitted in beta decay was measured by
several groups using a similar type of detector but was eventually
disproven by groups using a different kind of detector. A major
particle accelerator laboratory in Germany once held a press conference
to announce the discovery of a new particle based on a signal seen
after about a third of the data had been analyzed. To their chagrin,
the signal (based on a 3.5 sigma bump on top of a background distribution)
disappeared in the following months as the rest of the data was
processed.

In many of these cases, dozens of theoretical papers were published
that explored the implications of the experimental findings.

The moral of this story, is that you should not take the initial
report of a scientific finding at face value. Look to see, for example,
whether an experimental discovery is based on a single experiment
or is a confirmation of earlier experiments. The latter case is
much more reliable than the former.

August.26.2005

1:55 pm: New satellite service...
In the spring of 2005, a telecom in South Korea began to offer a
high speed wireless service that provide multi-channel TV and other
features. Both satellite and terrestrial signals are used. About
40,000 subscribers have signed up.

Here is some information sites about DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting)

12:25 pm: News brief ... A
particularly exasperating aspect of NASA budgeting is the way the
agency will often kill very effective, very low cost projects to
obtain money for very wasteful, very expensive projects. This seems
an especially egregious example: Save
the Moon Buggy Races

Many critics of spending on space don't make a distinction between
manned and unmanned systems. (I noticed this especially in the flurry
of editorials and essays after President Bush announced his space
initiative in January of 2004.) And why should they?
It's not as if missions to Mars or beyond have produced a tremendous
flood of direct practical benefits to the public or created lots
of important indirect spinoffs.

Those space science fans who advocate the elimination of manned
spaceflight in NASA because of a lack of near-term payoffs should
realize that the unmanned program would then become far more vulnerable
to the very same criticism.

Space science advocates like to bundle their spacecraft with communications
satellites, GPS, and remote sensing systems but those in fact could
all have been developed just fine without missions to Mars or Jupiter.

As shown in this NASA
budget table, the money spent on space science, which
mostly involves the deep space missions, is not a small fraction
of the manned program as many people seem to think. At $4B it is
equal to the Shuttle program and is comparable to the entire budget
for NSF. Without a manned spaceflight program to hide behind, space
science funding would be exposed for what it is: a stupendously
generous amount of money for an activity with meager immediate benefit.

The idea that all of the manned spaceflight money would shift over
to unmanned missions, or even to other basic sciences, is highly
improbable if not preposterous. Far more likely, is that the space
science budget would actually decline over time.

As I've noted before, the British government long ago eliminated
any support whatsoever for manned missions but this did not result
in a generous unmanned program. The Beagle
Two mission, for example, suffered fatally from a lack of funding.

Of course, like most proponents of manned missions, I think the
science program is well worth the expenditure and should get even
more money. It is one of the great strategic mistakes of the space
science community that it has never entered into a mutually supporting
alliance with manned spaceflight advocate organizations. That failure
of political insight and of imagination has resulted in a smaller,
weaker space program for everyone.

PS: The Planetary Society
has moved away from its early support only for unmanned science
to a general backing of manned spaceflight, at least for Mars exploration.
However, though it was founded by Carl Sagan and other noted space
scientists, it is not equivalent to the space science community.
The latter should follow the PS lead.

1:20 pm: SciTech news ... Promises
of holographic memory have been around for decades but it looks
like commercial products are finally coming to market:
Holographic Memory - Technology Review - Sept.2005. Too bad
the first generation systems will be too expensive for consumers.
They sure sound impressive:

The disc [of DVD size] has more than 60 times the storage capacity
of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster
than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store
up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the
full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than
three hours.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005, 7:00-8:30 pm (Pacific Time) - A re-broadcast
of the recent show with Joe Latrell of Beyond
Earth Enterprises who gave an update "on his company
and plans for sending items to space and more."

3:00 am: Spinning
off discoveries ... In RLV
News last Friday I posted an item
about a stem cell related spinoff from a NASA funded project. Rand
Simberg, though, thought it should be made more clear that the process
takes place on the ground and that like most other spinoffs cited
by NASA, it doesn't come close to justifying the expense involved
in doing science in space with the Shuttle and the ISS: More
Spinning Spinoff - Transterrestrial Musings - Aug.19.05.

I certainly agree with all that (see this discussion of spinoffs)
but I would not go nearly as far as he does in dismissing spinoffs
in general as just the result of occasional serendipity in any high
tech research. Doing exciting, on-the-edge research, whether it
is in basic science or in engineering, is a terrific environment
for stimulating new ideas and new inventions.

I will note, for example, that this nanotube
breakthrough, which I mentioned
on Friday and also posted
on Rand's site, can be traced directly back to the discovery of
Buckyballs.
That discovery didn't happen because the researchers were looking
directly for great nano-technology to build stuff with but it came
instead as a spinoff of the researchers' astrophysics studies of
red giant stars. It's quite possible that someone would have found
them eventually in a more direct manner but it also might have been
many years later and we would be the poorer for the wait.

The fact that funding for basic science like astrophyiscs is routinely
justified by such spinoffs seems perfectly appropriate to me. I
just advocate that basic engineering (OK, there is no such phrase
but you know what I mean) be treated the same way. Dealing with
the engineering challenges of living and working in space will result
in lots of spinoffs in the years to come, especially after the cost
of getting there drops significantly.

Students in the Department of Astronautics at the Technische Universitšt
Berlin, Germany developed a clever way to pack a telescope to fit
within the narrow confines of a small spacecraft. The unfolding
scheme was recently tested on a prototype in microgravity during
a parabolic flight mission:The
unfolding space telescope - ESA - July.27.05. The telescope
could be used for either astronomical or remote sensing applications.

Another student/amateur space based telescope project is ISSAT
(The International Space Station Amateur Telescope), which would
be placed on a truss of the ISS. The project has been delayed by
the lack of access to the station but in the meantime they plan
to operate the telescope on the ground in robotic
mode at the Arizona
Sky Village. They are currently in test phase of the Alpha telescope
but will take requests
for observations.

... The Mars Society's analog
stations are used by a number of projects to test technologies
like this spacesuit for applications on Mars. For example, the MonaLisa
Leonardo is an International Space University project that is
focused on studies at the MRDS (Mars
Desert Research Station) of both the social and technological
challenges of establishing a Mars base. ...

1:25 am: The next space tourist ...
Things seem to be going smoothly so far in Greg
Olsen's preparations for his trip to the ISS in October.
Information about him and his trip can be found in the
GoToOrbit.com section at Space
Adventures. I'll be posting articles about his trip in the Space
Tourism section.

4:35 pm: Space radio supplies...
As I described in the tutorial
in the Space
Radio section, tracking weather satellites and receiving
their images directly via your own home satellite station is great
fun. It provides a wonderfully visceral direct connection with what
is going on up there in space.

Unfortunately, since moving back to the US and living in condo
with a poor view of the sky, I have not gotten back into the hobby.
Today, though, when I visited the Hamtronics,
Inc. website, I felt that maybe I shouldn't wait till we move
to a house to build a new sat station.

In Sweden we used some excellent and very reasonably price equipment
from the British Timestep
company, which caters directly to those interested in weather sat
reception (as opposed to stores that deal in general ham radio supplies).
Located in the US, Hamtronics
also provides some low priced weather
fax equipment, like the R139 wideband fm receiver, aimed at
the hobbyist.

... Kranz will also be on the
SpaceShowon Monday, August 15. He will be promoting a sequel to
his previous History Channel program called Failure is Not an
Option broadcast in 2003 (see item
at collectSpace).. The sequel is called Beyond
The Moon: Failure Is Not An Option II and it will air on August
28th....

Rocketboosters to auction
flown Star Wars dolls for Charity
or
"I have you now, SpaceShipOne!"

On Monday, August 8, a charity auction will begin on Ebay for
the first of two flown and autographed Star Wars dolls - Luke
Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi. Details about the charity will be
announced before the auction. You can find more information and
pictures over at the Mojave Air and Space Collectibles site: http://www.mojaveairandspace.com/auction.html

Tuesday, August 2, 2005, 7:00-8:30 pm (Pacific Time) - Charles
Chafer, CEO of Space
Services, Inc, which provides rocket launches of cremated
remains via its Memorial
Spaceflights program (formerly Celestis).
He was also involved with the Team Encounter solar sail project.
[Perhaps we will find out why the Team
Encounter web site has been inactive for several months.]

Need a lively discussion in the morning while others are still
asleep? Tune-in to CNN at 7:15am EDT/4:15am PDT as Rick Tumlinson
and Miles O'Brien talk about Discovery, the future of the space
shuttle program, and what it means for the emerging commercial
space transportation industry

Hope CNN makes it available as a free video cause I ain't gonna
be up at that time. ...

... Here's a new online space
periodical: International
Space Review, which is unfortunately priced for those who can
charge the subscription to their business account.